


Altschmerz

by Fawx



Series: Opia [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationship, Rivalry Romance, copious alcohol consumption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-07 01:09:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4243746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fawx/pseuds/Fawx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re so sensitive, Fenris. It’s really touching.”</p>
<p>“I am unreservedly sensitive around someone who is crying and emotionally compromised,” he said flatly, crossing his arms. “Since that does not apply to anyone in this room, I am free to be as insensitive as I please.” <br/>--<br/>Hawke and Fenris trip headlong through a window into grief, anger, and coming to terms with a friendship neither of them wanted. <br/>Set post 'A Bitter Pill' and pre 'Prime Suspect'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Altschmerz

 

\--

 

"What are you so angry at?"

The question popped out, unbidden, after Fenris had drained the last of his glass and poured another. He froze, bottle halfway down to the table, and glanced at Hawke.

She looked up from her slouch, her face carefully impassive in a way he recognized. He'd seen it before, briefly: an odd, expressionless mask that was too neutral to be natural. It was a face that usually preceded a sudden flash of lightning. He'd hit a nerve.

"Interesting question," Hawke said. She sat up a little, her gaze fixed not on him but on the bottle that Fenris held suspended. He lowered it to the table with an empty thud and sat back, abandoning it as well as his drink. Hawke still had not met his gaze.

"Well?" He prompted. It was out now, nothing he could do to take it back. She would probably immolate him for asking, and it would be his own fault for getting too comfortably drunk with her. More the fool he.

"You first," Hawke said. Then she quirked a smile, and slouched back again, staring fixedly at the table. "Actually, I think I can guess."

"You are being evasive," Fenris accused. Hawke gave him a far too cheerful nod. He scowled. "Do you even have to ask?"

Hawke shrugged her shoulders, hands open, mouth pressed thin but curved up into a smile. Fenris' frown deepened. She was acting far too casual, too flippant. "Hawke."

She counted off on her fingers. "You're angry at Mages, Slavers, and Denarius, not necessarily in that order. Though I think I may be on your top ten of the rest, in some capacity."

"I would say you are flattering yourself, but you happen to be right."

"Oh? Where do I rank?"

"You are number five, preceded by raiders, followed by darkspawn."

She quirked an eyebrow at the tabletop. "That's a hell of a ranking."

"Answer my question."

Hawke's eyes snapped to his and he felt the urge to recoil spring up in the back of his mind. He denied it, stubbornly matching her stare for stare. A heavy, tense silence hovered between them. In it, challenge:  _did he really want to know_ ? Assurance:  _Yes, he asked the damn question and he expected an answer._

 

Hawke sat up in her chair and leaned forward, crossing her hands on the table. The stare remained unbroken.  _If you insist._

 

"Bethany," she said, finally.

"Your sister?"

Hawke nodded, her gaze flickered down and away. Fenris waited.

"I'm mad at her for dying, because now I have to be the blighted Good Witch," Hawke growled, then she sat back, slouching far enough in her chair that he couldn’t see her face above the table.

He knew about Bethany, though not in great detail, and what little he had heard hadn’t come from Hawke, at least not directly. He’d overheard conversations between her and Carver, ones he wished he  _hadn’t_ . Aveline had spoken of Bethany, once, in the Hanged Man, as a footnote to mentioning her Wesley. What did he know? That she was Carver’s twin, she had been sweet, apparently quite beautiful. That Carver - and possibly their mother - placed the blame for her death squarely on Hawke’s shoulders, which Hawke apparently carried without argument. Bethany Hawke had been good, and soft, and sweet, where Marian Hawke was ...well, she was good to a point, but nothing about her was soft and sweetness was an objective state of being, for her. At the very least, she could fake it well enough.

Hawke had never spoken an ill word about her sister. Not in the few conversations he’d caught, not in private, not ever. He scowled, leaned forward, and snatched his goblet from the table, downing it in one, deliberate swallow. If Hawke was angry at someone, for any reason, she made absolutely no effort to hide it.

“That is a  _bloody lie_ ,” he said, slamming the cup down. “I am not that drunk, or that stupid.” He was only  _almost_ drunk enough to believe her, which was somewhere past ‘drunk enough to care’ but safely distant from ‘stupid enough to attempt flirting again.’ Certainly not drunk enough to take some bullshit non-answer to what he was now delegating as a very Serious Question.

She didn’t sit up from her slouch; he nearly missed her mumbled reply: “No, it was a joke. I mean, between her and me. We used to joke about it.”

Another silence settled over the table. Fenris waited - for her to sit up and tell him the truth, or to leave, or to do something, but she didn’t move and didn’t speak, so he scraped himself away from the back of his own chair and looked over the table at her.

The heels of her hands she’d pressed against her eyes, her mouth was drawn in a flat line that was only barely keeping itself from turning to a miserable frown. Her face had gone red, and in the silence she drew a watery breath that clued Fenris in to the grand secret of this display: She was trying not to cry, and failing.

Fenris went very still. He had seen Hawke toe the line between life and death on a near-daily basis for three years, had watched her square her shoulders and tackle through any barrier set in her way, for good or ill. Hawke was supposed to be indomitable. There shouldn’t have been room for sorrow in all that determined anger. Right now, there wasn’t enough room in his mind to even process that not only did she indeed have sorrow, she was succumbing to it right in front of him, and he had no idea what to do about it.

He wanted to get out, but he couldn't just look away, and he would never be able to un-see her like this. Worse, somehow his good sense had been supplanted with the urge to run for the Alienage, grab Merrill, drag her back here, sit her in front of Hawke, and tell her to _fix things_. At least Merrill knew how to navigate the bizarre landscape that was Hawke's emotional state. Or she was better at it than most, anyway. She knew what Keepers knew, and Keepers, if Merrill’s unwelcome rambling on the subject had told him anything, knew how to navigate… this sort of thing. He understood grief, to a point, but he was woefully unequipped when it came to handling someone else’s, much less being witness to it.

Besides, the Alienage was far from here, and it was late, and Fenris could tell that Hawke was fighting a losing battle with her own sorrow. Invulnerable, inscrutable, irritating Hawke was gone, the mask had burned up into nothing and now, instead of Hawke The Angry Mage it was just… Hawke, the person, battling her grief alone. Still irritating, but now with a side of need, and despite the competitive lines drawn in the dirt between them, he wasn’t about to let her sit in the dark alone with... this.

He leaned forward, bracing himself on the table, keeping it between them like a ballast. In spite of his good intentions, he didn’t want to be too close if she actually _did_ start crying. Maker help him if there was wholesale weeping involved.

“Hawke?”

“Don’t you have the decency to be too drunk to care about what I’m doing right now?” She snapped, dropping her arms so they crossed over her face. The motion was too quick for him to see if there actually were tears, but at this point he wasn’t sure if their actual presence mattered any longer. 

“I am not in the habit of catering to your delicate constitution,” he snapped back, reaching for the wine bottle on the table. It was empty; he scowled darkly at it for this betrayal, stood, and went to the dusty wine rack next to the fireplace. A few bottles were untouched near the bottom; he picked one at random, then prized free the cork and flicked it into the fireplace. He dragged his chair around the table until it faced Hawke’s, sat down, grabbed one of her crossed arms, and shoved the open bottle into her hand. It was no Tevinter Red, but it would have to do, given the circumstances. So much for not wanting to get any closer. Oh well, if he was going to be in the line of fire anyway.

She took the wine, and without uncovering her arm from her eyes, tipped the bottle and drank. A third of the vintage vanished, she coughed once, and handed the bottle back to him with a muttered word of thanks.

“I thought jokes were supposed to make you laugh,” Fenris said, taking a swig, then setting the bottle on the floor between their chairs. Hawke shrugged.

“It did, once.” Her arms crossed over her eyes again, underneath them her mouth had curled into a grimace - he could see a divot where she was biting the inside of her cheek.

“Instead, it is making you cr-”

“I AM NOT CRYING.”

She hadn’t moved, not an inch, and he hadn’t felt any flare of magic that usually accompanied an outburst like that from every mage he’d ever encountered. Just the same, Fenris thanked all the Gods he could currently remember the names to that she didn’t see him jump in his seat as hard as he’d done. In three years, he still hadn’t managed to shake that little twitch, that flight response whenever a known mage got loud and angry. He scowled unseen at Hawke as she sniffed, loudly, and scrubbed her arms over her face.

“Oh, yes, of course, I must have mistaken the disgusting sniffling for something completely different,” he groused, settling back in his chair. “I hope you were not banking on an acting career, Serah Hawke, because you are terrible at it.”

Hawke weakly kicked his shin - the impact barely registered. Fenris considered kicking her back, but he knew that would simply wind down the road of them kicking each other until they were exhausted, probably knocking over the wine bottle, and nothing would get resolved. He’d refrain for the wine’s sake, at least.

He sighed, scooted his chair a little closer, and settled in. “So, what was the joke supposed to be, if not a catalyst for poorly-concealed blubbering?”

“You’re so sensitive, Fenris. It’s really touching.”

“I am unreservedly sensitive around someone who is crying and emotionally compromised,” he said flatly, crossing his arms. “Since that does not apply to anyone in this room, I am free to be as insensitive as I please.”

Surprisingly, that got a little laugh. “Great, and now you think you’re funny,” she said. Then, she uncrossed her arms, scrubbed her face with her hands, and let out a slow, quiet sigh. “You’re never allowed to ask me questions when I’m this drunk again.”

_Shouldn’t have asked the damned question in the first place,_ he thought, sober or not, but there was no taking it back now. And the more she evaded answering the question, the more she tried to steer him away, the more he wanted to know what the bedeviled thing was that hounded her into the constantly-checked fury riding sidesaddle to whatever other insanities were present and keeping her going. He was sick of round-about non-answers, of being jerked around with half-lie jokes instead of the truth. This time, he wasn’t going to be distracted from it.

“I have asked you more compromising questions when you were stone cold sober, if you recall,” he replied evenly, then nudged the wine bottle towards her with a pointed little smirk.

She scoffed. "Typical. You sleep with someone _once_ and then they think they have access to all your dirty little secrets."

Fenris nearly knocked the bottle over, catching it just in time to prevent a fatal spill. He glanced up at Hawke, who raised an inquisitive eyebrow at him. “What?” She asked.

“I… was under the impression that-” Well, neither of them had said they would never bring up their little one night stand in private, but he’d assumed she wouldn’t want to talk about it. He certainly didn’t. He frowned. “Er, the agreement to set that aside was… mutual.” So much for not being distracted. Damn her. Damn _him_ for - again - putting the wrong statement forward. He glanced up, trying not to show the embarrassment, the irritation.

Hawke took a breath, held it as she processed what he’d said, and then barked out a short laugh. “By the _Maker_ Fenris, I was being sarcastic! Yes, it was a mutual agreement, and you were right about. You know, things going too fast. Why, do you think I’m angry at you or something?” She grinned, and then sobered suddenly, as if coming to a realization. “That is _not_ what I’m angry at, per your earlier question.”

“No, clearly not,” he said, shifting a little uncomfortably in his seat. He hadn’t expected her to be quite so. Intent. On laying down that not being the reason for her anger. Of course it wasn’t but…

Damn her and her distractions. He tried a smile, to brush off the sudden gravity. “Say that part about me being right again; I could stand to hear that a few more times.” It was a relief, to be sure, even after the shock of her just… casually bringing it up like that. It was much better forgotten (as if he could, as if the red scrap of cloth he’d tied around his wrist and the crest he wore on his armor didn’t mean far, far more than just advertising his ‘loyalty to the Hawke Family,’) or at least swept aside for more pressing and remarkable matters, such as the secret of Hawke’s insane rage, currently being uncovered. No distractions. Right. Time to really knuckle down on this.

“I'd say no because you're pretending to be charming, but if it means I don’t have to reveal any more compromising information about myself, I’ll compose an epic poem about how brilliant and right you are about everything, all the time, forever,” Hawke mumbled, trying on a grin that lasted barely a moment.

Well, that was tempting, but. No. “Tell me the joke, Hawke.”

“ _Damn_ you.”

Fenris leaned in, rested his elbows on his knees, folded his hands under his chin, and gave Hawke an expectant, attentive look. She glowered darkly at him, then sat up in her chair, holding up her hands in surrender.

“Fine. But it’s more an in-joke between her and I than anything else - there’s not a huge story in it or anything.”

“If you don’t get on with telling me I’ll get Varric over here to take the whole thing down so he can turn it into one of his ‘Hawke Fairy Tales,’” Fenris said, keeping his expression neutral.

“I will if you’d stop _bloody interrupting_!” She bristled, then went still, waiting to see if he’d say anything else. Fenris simply gestured for her to continue. She stared him down, then grabbed the wine bottle, took a long swig, then set the bottle very deliberately between them. “All right,” she said, finally. “Okay. Fine. So. A few years after Bethany started growing in to her magic, we had to leave the town we were living in. She’d gone and healed some stupid bloke who’d gotten his leg broken falling off a cart, and the bastard went screaming to the Templars as soon as he could walk again.”

She leaned back in her seat a little, walking the fingers of one hand across the palm of the other. “Down through the Hinterlands we went, with not a lot more than the clothes on our back and what little we could carry. Initially we were going to go straight to Lothering, but we got turned around and ended heading South, towards the Wilds. Set us back - oh, let’s say a good two weeks of travel through muck and swamp, with just father and I having enough control of our magic to keep anything at bay.” Hawke paused, smiling a little. “It was terribly difficult, but a lot of fun. Honestly I was probably just too young to realize how much danger we were in, because it felt like an adventure. Anyway. We slogged through the Wilds a few days, didn’t see very many people. On the third or… maybe fourth day, we met an old woman.”

“That Fairy Tale remark from earlier was meant to be a joke,” Fenris said, a warning tone in his voice.

“ _You’re_ a joke. Just shut up and let me tell the story, would you? There was an old woman in the Wilds. There are old women everywhere, they kind of happen after young women do some aging and don’t get themselves killed in stupid ways.”

“I suppose that is a valid point. Carry on.”

“ _Thank_ you. So this old woman, she invited us to use her firepit and sleep in her house for the night as long as Father and Carver were good for stocking her with extra firewood, and we figured we weren’t going to get a better deal than that, so they went off to stock firewood while we helped the old woman tidy her house a bit.”

“Is that common? Cleaning house for random strangers, I mean. This is still sounding more like ‘fairy tale’ and less like ‘Hawke being honest.’”

Hawke stared at him for a beat. “Of. Course it’s common. We weren’t just going to squat on this woman’s land without doing something to earn it. We Hawkes tend to try and pull our own weight, if you hadn’t noticed.” Hawke shook her head. “Gods. Anyway, Mother and Bethany and I helped around the place as the woman dictated, and then, out of bloody damn nowhere comes a pack of wolves-”

Fenris lifted an eyebrow, opening his mouth to interject.

“Put that incredulous eyebrow back down where it belongs, you. I’m being serious.” Fenris closed his mouth again, but the eyebrow remained lifted in an accusatory manner. “Better. Anyway, wolves. Maybe about five or six of them, with just me, Bethany, Mother, and this old woman. Father and Carver were out the Maker knows how far away, so, Bethany and I decided to take matters into our own hands.”

“Called a lightning storm on them, did you?”

“Sure did. With Bethany freezing their paws out from under them. She wasn’t strong, back then, but she could slip up anything smaller than a bronto. Got two or three wolves straightened out and the rest high-tailed it back into the swamps. Mother fainted.”

“And the old woman?”

Hawke paused, drawing her fingers together under her chin. “Hardly blinked during the whole ordeal. Just watched us run right out the door and into a pack of wolves. And when we were done, she’d put Mother in a chair and sat us on the front stoop. Just… sat there with us, smiling for a little bit, and then she said-” Hawke dropped her voice to a low cadence, and Fenris felt a weird pinprick of recognition, though it passed quickly. “‘ _So, two little witches, hm? I wonder, who is the Good Witch, and who is the Bad Witch?_ ’ And I s-” She stuttered, stopped, then passed a hand over her face, taking a breath. It had that shake Fenris recognized now, the sound of grief pushing its way up through the drunkenness. He could see the divot again, Hawke furiously biting down on the inside of her cheek. Whatever had sparked the grief in remembering the exchange, it had come much closer to the surface this time.

Hawke took another breath, held it, and then dropped her hand from her face, expression back to neutral with a side of sloshed. “And I said, _‘Bethany’s the Bad Witch. She can hardly cast spells yet.’_ Which made her - I mean, the old woman - laugh, and she said ‘ _Ahh, clever little girl._ ’ And… something else, about balance and being naive and somesuch other nonsense.” Hawke waved her hand dismissively.  “But it was that ‘Good Witch or Bad Witch’ question that stuck. With me and Bethany, I mean. When we got older, we talked about that day and eventually figured she meant ‘which of you is going to be the nice sweet bringer of fantastical magic and lover of children and animals, and which of you is going to be the huge bitch’ and things kind of fell into place from there.”

“So, the joke was that your sister was essentially an earthbound angel while you were… yourself.”

“And the lamentation that we could never reverse that role, because being nice too long would drive me crazy, and being mean just isn’t in her blood. Wasn’t, sorry.” She sniffed. “Usually it was after she had to heal some ungrateful bastard, she’d just look at me and say ‘ _Why can’t I be the Bad Witch?_ ’ Or if I had to go and intimidate some mess of stupid buggers trying to harass us, I’d look at her after and say ‘ _Why don’t I ever get to be the Good Witch?_ ’ And we’d laugh, because we were stupid.”

“And now, with no Bethany…”

“I have to be the Good Witch.” Hawke tapped her fingers together under her chin, averting her gaze again. “I have to try and be as good a person as she was, or else. I don’t know, I’d probably end up some blood-mad magister like Danarius or something.”

“You are _nothing_ like Danarius,” Fenris said, the words coming out unbidden. He’d thought it, of course, many times, but he’d never meant to let her know he placed her as Separate from other mages. He snatched the wine bottle before he could catch her questioning look, drained the last of it, then tossed the empty bottle into the fireplace. He stared at the fire and ignored the pinprick feeling of having Hawke stare at _him_ , a crackling silence filling the room.

Being the Good Witch. The sister gone that would have filled the role - he wondered if any of this were true or if it was simply Hawke gilding the memory of her sister to suit some unspeakable need to avoid the reality of the situation: that Bethany had simply been another person, with a slightly less abrasive attitude than her sister, who had died tragically before some imagined fantasy of a future had been fulfilled. It was certainly sad, he even felt a little sad on Hawke’s behalf, sad that he’d never met this mythical ‘Good Witch’ that Bethany had been. Maybe even a little sad that he didn’t know how to empathize, having never known his own, also possibly mythical sister. The snatches of memory he’d briefly glimpsed before were not enough for empathy - merely fodder to make his own demons angrier. Not the anger he’d been searching for in Hawke, however.

There was no anger in the story, or in the aftermath that Hawke was using as an excuse for her personality. It was clear that she was very, deeply sad about her sister’s death, but… certainly not angry. Not angry at Bethany, at least.

“You’d probably have ended up being a good person anyway,” he said, after some drunken deliberation among his thoughts left Honesty briefly, and disastrously, in charge of his mouth. “If she had not died, she likely would have kept you… balanced. Like the old woman said. Without her, you carry on still as if she were here, so there is truly no difference in you now that she is gone. You… are not angry at Bethany.”

“...No. I’m not.” Hawke sat hunched in her chair. Her elbows were braced on the armrest, hands folded across her eyes again. He could see tears, this time. Seeing them now was somehow much worse than not being able to catch them before. Hawked pushed them away with her thumbs, her mouth curling back again to a pained grimace. “No, I’m not angry at Bethany.”

“Why did you tell me you were?”

“Well I didn’t remember you were a nosy little _fuckface_ , now did I? Thought you’d be polite and give it up after I said ‘my sister’ instead of prying you... horrible little bastard.” The words were harsh, but her tone was defeated. Fenris smiled a little at that.

“Point taken. What are you angry at, then? Aside from me, right now.”

The silence came back, colder and darker than it had been before. Hawke drew her hands down away from her eyes, watching him from over the backs of her fingers.

“Do you really think I’m a good person, Fenris?”

He went still. Pinned under that gaze, the question felt like a challenge, almost a prelude to a threat. It wasn’t the same look she had when they faced off in a spar, but it was close enough. More serious, there was gravity here stronger than he was familiar with. There was an _expectation_ , and he realized he was expected to be completely honest, for good or ill, despite the labyrinth of half-assed lies Hawke had forced him to navigate in order to get to this point. If he answered this question truthfully, he would finally get the answer he sought.

He eyed the wine rack, but this time thought better. Answer this, and conquer the Sphinx’s riddle. Best to be leaning towards sober for something like that. He rubbed his hands together, avoiding Hawke’s stare, knowing that she would wait in silence for however long it took for him to answer. They’d gone far beyond the usual, somewhat good-natured barbs they usually traded. An hour and three bottles of wine ago he’d have said ‘ _No, Hawke, you’re a terrible person and we both know it,_ ’ because she quantifiably _was_ terrible - she was a criminal in several capacities, a terrible influence on small children, merciless in a fight and generally lacking tact unless she decided to exercise diplomacy for whatever reason had her up for a cause…

However, now was not an hour ago, and the alcohol in his bloodstream still had gotten the rest of him to unanimously agree that, at least for now, Honesty could continue to drive him right into a ditch. Or a shallow grave. Same difference. An hour ago, he hadn’t been the one to pop the lid off the jar that had kept her grief checked and away from all consideration. He hadn’t seen her fight tears, an hour ago.

“I think… You try to be as good as you can, given the circumstances,” he began, then paused. He glanced up; she hadn’t moved but for a slight narrowing of the eyes. He kept her gaze, this time;  took a breath, held it. She had gone so still he may well have been talking to a statue. “You joke about praise, but you do not truly credit yourself for the good you have done. Good is not something you are, Hawke. It is something you do. You try to do it well. Often, you succeed.”

“Often,” Hawke repeated. Her face was as still and neutral as a mask, but she was staring hard, staring in that way that always made the back of his neck itch, like she was looking down and into the hidden parts of his mind. Like Danarius, but unlike Danarius… his former master had casually used magic to lay his thoughts bare. Here, Hawke wouldn’t even so much as spark a light to the hearth with her magic unless he gave her the go-ahead, even when they fought. Especially when they fought. She'd given her word. He realized suddenly that if he hadn’t thought about it, he never would have accused Hawke of using her magic to pry into his mind. Now, even imagining it as a hypothetical situation seemed absurd.

“In my estimation,” he said, “yes, often. Even when I disagree on the terms of what is and is not ‘good.’”

“Which is often,” Hawke’s voice came out in a broken little whisper. There was that sardonic grin on her face again, the open challenge to him and the rest of the world to just _try_ and make her take things seriously, but it was empty now, plastered on her face under eyes that were still looking at him hard, that were still wet with unshed tears and red from wine and sorrow. He realized with a kind of belated satisfaction that he’d answered well, that there were no more metaphorical alleys for her to dodge down, nothing else for her to try and distract him with. Why it had even mattered, why she couldn’t have just told him the damn truth and be done with it, that didn’t matter. He could be irritated about being made to navigate this labyrinth later, for now, he watched Hawke fold in on herself while she gathered the words to tell him the truth.

Her hands dropped, she crossed her arms over her chest like an embrace and sagged in the chair, drawing up her legs to her chin, barely perched in the seat like a sad, little bird.

“I’m angry at myself,” she said, finally. She stared at him from over the tops of her knees, then drew her legs up further to cover her face and said nothing more.

Fenris leaned forward, placed his hands on her knees, and pushed them to one side. “Why, Hawke.” She grumbled at him, but didn’t try to push her legs back or hide again.

“Often isn’t  _good enough_ , Fenris,” she said, then scrubbed at her face, teeth bared in a grimace. Her eyes were still wet, but the tears didn’t look to be in any danger of falling again. The few from before, it seemed, had been an acceptable sacrifice. “You know that better than anyone, often is _never_ good enough.” She took her hand from her face and turned her grimace to her palm. “Not when I’ve got magic, and the responsibility to use it right. Not when I’ve got you and the others as my compass. Not when I know full fucking well one slip, well-intentioned or no, could…” she flared out her fingers in an explosive gesture for punctuation. “Do you have any idea how often the thought crosses my mind that I could be just like the Magisters in Tevinter? Blessed Maker, of course you know. It would be so easy to just. Stop caring.”

_That is the biggest lie you have ever told_ , Fenris thought. Though instead of voicing the accusation, he merely said, “Would it, now.”

“Yes! It would! You’ve said it enough before, I’m like any other mage; At any minute, I could just give in and say that the ends will justify the means, That making a pact with a demon or resorting to blood magic or…” she waved her hands frustratedly in his direction, “draining you of Lyrium is fine as long as my goals are realized, you understand? I can _be_ the Bad Witch, Fenris. It’s always there, the temptation is _always there_ and there’s nothing but my word keeping it back.”

“You always keep your word,” he replied, but his voice sounded hollow to his ears, distant. Sobriety was threatening to seize him now from a fog of nebulous, indefinable emotions. _Compass_? What did she mean, calling him - them - a compass?

“I shouldn’t have to! I shouldn’t have to _promise_ someone I’m not going to hurt them! The thought that I _can_ shouldn’t be there in the first place! I shouldn’t have to force myself away from weakness at every opportunity, and I hate myself for wanting to reach for it.”

Fenris put his head to one side. He both could and could not quite believe what he was hearing, these words that were coming out of a mage’s mouth. A mage who was Hawke, granted, but still. “Hang about, you consider the use of blood magic, of pacting with demons, to be a _weakness_?”

She nodded, rubbed her nose. “Don’t tell Merrill. Or Anders. Or anyone. But for the Maker’s sake _especially_ not Merrill.”

“Blood magic is literally the most powerful magic a mage has access to,” Fenris said, realizing, though not really caring, that he was staring at her in dumb wonder. Hawke scowled at him.

“It’s  _base_ and it’s stealing. I’ll take coin from a corpse after a fight if I have to but I’m not sacrificing someone’s life just so I can get a little edge on a spell. I- what?”

Fenris had leaned back to pick up one of the empty bottles scattered around his seat, holding it up to the light to peer at the label. “Nothing, just checking to see if there’s any wormwood in this, because I must be hallucinating.”

“Since when are you a mean drunk,” Hawk growled, crossing her arms a little tighter around herself.

“Since about the time you became a weepy one,” He leaned in again, propping his arm on her knees, gesturing with the bottle. “You seriously mean to tell me you do not use blood magic because you think it makes you  _weaker_ ?”

Hawke’s face pulled into a dramatic frown. She scowled at Fenris petulantly, hunching down a little further in her seat.“Yes.”

“And, you are angry at yourself for wanting to use it anyway?”

“ _Yes_ .” She reached out, grabbed the empty bottle from his hand, and tossed it away. It crash landed on the hearth, as violent a punctuation as she could get while still looking like a miserable puppy. “Stop pointing that damn thing at me. Also, your incredulity isn’t making this any easier to admit, you know.”

“My incredulity has a rather firm basis in reality.”

“I know.”

Fenris crossed both his arms over Hawke’s knees now,  leaned in, and rested his chin on his crossed wrists. “It sounds like you just told me a  _spectacular_ lie.”

“Oh, come on, when do I ever lie to you?” She paused, her brain taking the opportunity to catch up with her mouth. “I mean when it matters.”

He hadn’t sobered up nearly enough to answer that question the way he wanted to. Honesty seized the reins again. “You’ve been telling the same lie every day for as long as I’ve known you,” he said, lifting his shoulders in a little shrug.

“Yeah? What lie is that?”

“It’s usually a variation on the theme of ‘I’m okay.’”

Silence returned for an encore. Hawke stared at Fenris with the defiant anger of a child that had just been caught doing something foolish. Fenris stared at Hawke and after a moment realized how horribly Honesty had betrayed him, coughed, and looked away. “Granted,” he said, after a moment, “ _none_ of us are okay.”

The anger diminished, Hawke nudged at him with her knees. “When did you get so damned perceptive?”

“Being unobtrusively observant is a highly prized skill in a slave,” he shrugged. “I watch people. Find their weaknesses. Strike when least expected. Social assassination, you see.”

“Like asking bizarrely out-of-place questions when we were supposed to spend the night getting blind stupid drunk and not thinking about our problems?”

“Precisely.”

“Making me cry was the bonus, I guess,” she muttered.

“I seem to recall you very forcefully insisting that you were not crying.”

“My  _theoretical_ tears were a bonus, then.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he snorted. “I simply wished to know why you were so angry all the time.  _You_ chose to lie to save face.”

“Well, now you know. I fully expect you to weaponize this advantage as soon as possible.” She tried a smile on for size, it lingered for a little while before fading. “Not what you expected?”

“I had entertained a few ideas about which particular rage demon had stuck itself to you, yes.”

Hawke lifted an eyebrow. “Such as?”

_Actual demonic possession was the top of the list_ , he thought. Knowing the truth made his assumptions seem absurdly comical, now. Of  _course_ the thing that made her so damned unbearable was also part of what made her endearing.

Fenris scoffed at her. "Typical,” he said, flashing a grin. “You sleep with someone _once_ and then they think they have access to all your dirty little secrets."

 

\--

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Altschmerz  
> n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.
> 
> This fic (and subsequent stories related to it) is my attempt at playing in the rivalry romance sandbox. Not exactly canon compliant.


End file.
